Data discovery leads to happy customers

Oberweis Dairy is bringing state-of-the-art analytics to its decidedly old-fashioned business – home milk delivery and traditional ice cream shops. With SAS Business Analytics, the company mines its data to better understand which customers shop through its different channels for more effective cross-selling and up-selling. The marketing efforts are critical as the company hopes to expand in the coming years.

Oberweis Dairy at a glance

The company has 48 dairy stores in the Midwest, along with a six-state home delivery network. It also sells wholesale through local and national grocery chains. The dairy stores sell prepared ice cream treats along with milk, packaged ice cream and other fresh, perishable foods. Oberweis wanted to understand its customer base better so it could cross- and up-sell without cannibalizing from existing sales channels.

With SAS, Oberweis:

Can easily mine dairy store receipt data, match it against loyalty card information and select the best candidates for home delivery sales campaigns.

Learned that running specials on milk sold through grocery store chains doesn't cannibalize from dairy store or home delivery sales. The sevenfold increase in sales at grocery stores during a recent promotion helped introduce new customers to the Oberweis brand.

Automated reports designed to calculate commissions for home delivery drivers. The process had previously taken a combined management effort of 20 hours a week using a system that relied heavily on Excel spreadsheets.

Getting the big picture

Oberweis uses SAS® Visual Data Discovery to view data. "It's a much faster way to identify correlations and trends in data," says Bruce Bedford, Vice President of Marketing Analytics and Consumer Insight.

Why SAS?

"I think implementing SAS is a great way for a small company to become a large company," Bedford says. "One of the most valuable assets of any company, large or small, is its data, but you have to analyze it. SAS is one of the best tools available to do that."

Challenge

Understand how customers shop across different channels and effectively cross-sell and up-sell products.

Solution

Benefits

Reports that consumed 20 hours a week are now automated. The company learned that running specials on milk sold through grocery chains doesn't cannibalize from other sales channels. It also quickly found and fixed manufacturing glitches by mining customer complaint data and it used SAS to create a program to root out bottle return fraud.

The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.